Unstable, Unforseen and Lost Connections: Expanding the Political Arena in Development Cooperation and Indigenous Communities in the Paraguayan Chaco

Abstract

The article is a reflection on the definition of the political arena in the Paraguayan context and beyond. In particular, it provides a close look on the way in which this arena gets stretched and blurred in the space of encounter between indigenous communities and development institutions in two specific case studies. The first is the case of the maskoy communities of Alto Paraguay, where the absence of “developmental” forms of indigenous organizations parallels a strong re-enactment of collective ceremonies that are not considered political by non-indigenous observers but they certainly are if we try to reformulate “the political” according to other ontological premises. In the second case, the Sanapaná and Enxet community of Xakmok Kásek works with an advocacy ngo to reclaim a part of their ancestral land before the Paraguayan Parliament through an expropriation law project against the landowner who holds the land title. At reaching point of discussion of the law project, the community ask the ngo an additional support to hold a shamans’ meeting to act upon the lawmakers. The example show once more that politics that not reduces its realm to the actions of humans alone. Both cases also altogether demonstrate the feeble developmental attempts to separate “human” from “nature” and the limitations of advocacy ngo endeavours to fully understand politics as cosmopraxis. Thus, the indigenous challenges to the “modern” limits of the political arena, which provokes tensions and misunderstandings, ask to slow down reasoning and re-imagine a configuration for future alliances and political practices